Al Buell - Alfred Leslie Buell (1910 – 1996) was born in Hiawatha, Kansas and grew up in Cushing, Oklahoma. He attended the some classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, which, in concert with a trip to New York City, decided him on a career in art. He was a paperback cover artist, magazine illustrator, and Coca Cola artist worked with Elvgren in the Sundblom shop in Chicago. His oils are among the best pin-ups in that medium, although existing originals (on board, not canvas) are much smaller than those of Elvgren, Ballantyne and Ekman.
In 1935, Buell and his wife moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined the Stevens/Hall/Biondi Studio. By 1940, he had opened his own studio. During this period, he did a number of pin-ups for the Gerlach-Barklow calendar company. Buell also did work for several other calendar companies in the early 1940s.
During World War II, Buell was rejected by the draft, so he spent the war painting a variety of popular and patriotic pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow. After the war was over, he began contributing to Esquire's Gallery of Glamour.
Perhaps that explains a certain delicacy in his work; Buell's pretty girls really are "pretty." These girls-next-door are captured in such typically innocent pursuits as sewing, playing tennis, or riding a swing. Unclad as they are, Buell's girls have a wholesomeness, an ingenuousness, rare in the pin-up form.
Often his pin-ups have solid black backgrounds, a la Walt Otto; in other cases, he creates full settings, particularly in the pseudonymous paintings (signed "Al Leslie") he did when moonlighting from Brown & Bigelow at lesser companies. In these paintings Buell strayed into the area of embarrassed coy cutes, often accompanied by cute puppies who inadvertently caused skirts to be raised.
Buell returned to Brown & Bigelow in the late 1950s. He continued to paint glamour and pin-ups until about 1965, when he retired from commercial art. He remained active until he was injured in an accident in 1993, after which he remained in a nursing home until his death in 1996.

Al Moore (19?? - 1991) Moore was a busy illustrator from the 1940s to the late 50s, generating advertising, fashion, story art, and pin-ups. Covers for Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and interior work for these and Woman's Home Companion, American Magazine, Woman's Day, McCall's, Cosmopolitan. Ads for Hertz, Whitman's Chocolates, Ford, Camay, Nash, US Rubber, Coke, Old Gold, Botany.
 Replaced Vargas and Petty as Esquire's main pin-up man. Moore's girls are less glossy and impossible than those of his talented predecessors, being more girl-next door realistic and natural. Heir apparent to Varga at Esquire was Al Moore, who shared the magazine's 1948 calendar with Ben-Hur Baz and other major commercial artists contending for the role. In 1949, 1950 and 1951, Moore was solo artist on the best selling, most prestigious pin-up calendar around. Why he was replaced is unknown another money dispute, possibly?
 Petty or Varga-level fame eluded Moore, but his pin-ups are among the best of the late 1940s early '50s, bridging the glamour girls-next-door of Elvgren and the post-war, modern look of Chiriaka and others. Like Elvgren, Moore created voluptuous dream women; but his strong design sense linked him to Chiriaka, as did his use of gouache to give his girls graduated skin tones and a sensual, earthy quality. Moore's women were wide-eyed wonders, usually blonde, curves spilling out of bikini tops, full bruised lips promising passion. These provocative yet All American temptresses preened for the viewer, very direct, seldom coy, promising the sexual revolution that was to come. He provided calendars for Esquire, Brown and Bigelow. Last illustrations for Pan Am and US Olympics.

Alberto Vargas (1896–1982) was a noted painter of pin-up girls and erotica. Vargas was born in Arequipa, Peru, the son of a successful photographer, and was educated in Switzerland. Arriving in New York in 1916, he was determined to stay in America and pursue what became an illustrious career.
His name has become synonymous with pin-up girls, but in the early 1940s, he was just a guy hired by Esquire magazine to imitate departed star George Petty, who bolted over pay. Vargas initially aped Petty's sleek women with their telephone posing and large-hat lounging; soon, however, his own distinctive, delicate watercolor style emerged. His wide-eyed wonder-women rivaled Betty Grable as the ultimate pin-up girl of World War II. Vargas (who signed his Esquire work "Varga") had already achieved some notoriety for his Ziegfeld Follies and movie poster art. But Esquire made him famous, though he was paid poorly and, like Petty, eventually quit. Legal problems over ownership of his work even his own signature plagued him.
But late in his life, Vargas was given a second shot at fame and fortune by longtime fan Hugh Hefner. He is perhaps most famous for his 16 years illustrating for Playboy magazine, during the 1960s and 70s. His pictures would often portray, elegantly dressed, semi-nude to nude women of perfect proportions; large breasts, curved waists, etc. Vargas's artistic trait would be slender fingers and toes, often nails being painted red.
One of the true giants of American illustration, Alberto Vargas has created an art style so sensuous, so exquisite, that for the past six decades his magnificent paintings of women have come to embody the fantasies of three generations of women and men around the world. His work also appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Theatre Magazine, and Tattler. He died in December 1982.

 Archie Dickens (1907 - 2004) is a British pin-up artist. He attended the Slade School of Art in London. He currently resides and works in West Wickham, Kent and has published two books. In 2001 Tony Blair wore a Paul Smith designer shirt that displayed one of Dicken's paintings on the cuff. Archie died on November 28, 2004 at the age of 98.

Art Frahm (1907-1981) was an American painter of campy pin-up girls and advertising. Frahm lived in Chicago, Illinois, and was active from the 1940s to 1960s. Today he is best known for his "ladies in distress" pictures involving beautiful young women whose panties mysteriously flutter to the ground in public situations, usually causing them to drop their bag of groceries. In one of Frahm's noted idiosyncratic touches, celery is often depicted.
Frahm had adequate technical competence for his medium, with a style somewhat reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's although more cartooned. He was mostly influenced by commercial artist Haddon Sundblom, with whom Frahm may have worked as an assistant early in his career. Frahm's forte was depicting beautiful young White women, with great care taken in rendering their legs and figures. Frahm's depictions of the women's faces are less successful, often tending towards plastic doll-like expressions. Minor problems with perspective and unrealistic depiction of subsidiary figures and objects are common in Frahm's work.
Frahm was commercially successful. His falling-panties paintings are still considered too camp to be art, and too juvenile to be erotica. However this genre (which Frahm seems to have created) was in demand in the 1950s, and was later imitated by some other pin-up artists. The falling-panties art has a small cult following as mid-20th century kitsch, or even as fetish art. The works are best described with plenty of irony; James Lileks' clever analysis of Frahm's work has brought it to the attention of many on the Internet. In addition to pin-ups, Frahm created a series of humorous hobo-theme calendar illustrations. His advertising art included works for Coca-Cola and Coppertone.

Arthur Sarnoff  (1912 - 2000) born in Brooklyn, New York, was a student of John Clymer and Andrew Wyeth. Sarnoff studied at the Industrial School and the Grand Central School of Art in New York City. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators and exhibited widely including the National Academy of Design. Much work for weekly and monthly mags from the 30s on and ads for Karo Syrup (Karo Kid is a 40s icon), Dextrose (ditto the Sugar Blonde), Lucky Strike, Coors, Camay, Sal Hepatica, Listerine, Vick's Vapo Rub, Meds, Ipana. Illustrations for McCall's, American Weekly, Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, Redbook, American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping. Portraits of President and Mrs Kennedy. Two subjects keep him famous: popular and tasteful pin-up girl calendars and the pool playing (and card playing and golfing) dogs, of which, "The Hustler" one was the best-selling print of the 1950s. He was also known to have painted portraits of famous individuals such as Bob Hope and John F. Kennedy. Sarnoff usually signed art, using full name, or "Sarnoff", or just "AS."

Aslan (1930 - ) Alain Gourdon (aka "Aslan") is a sculptor, painter and drawer
Aslan was born at Bordeaux (France) on may 23rd 1930. When he was 11, he has carved a stone in an old man head with odds and ends. The year after, he putted money aside to get 2 soft stones, from where would born his first sculptures. At 14, he is admitted to "Les beaux-arts de Bordeaux" (school of fine Arts), after passing the admission requirements without any difficulties.
 He dicovers clay modeling and at home, in front of a three-faceted mirror, he sculpts his own bust. It is such a nice work of Art, that the fine art director doubts its authenticity and unwittingly pays its authors the highest compliments by saying : ''It remains to be seen whether he made it or not !''
The following year, at 15, he's awarded first prize from the University of artistic Anatomy.
At 16, Paris beckons: The Famous superior school of fine Arts (L'école superieur des Beaux-Arts de Paris) where he was admitted, although underage, due to the sponsorship of painter Jean-Gabriel Domergue. He successfully passes the entrance examinations and ends up in second place out of 100 students. "I always felt out of place in 20th-century abstract expresssionism Art, which negates all the well-established rules agreed upon over milleniums.
Art was born universally figurative, 35,000 years ago, without consensus or other possible influence. Throughout the ages, painters and sculptors have used nature as a means of expressing their feelings, their emotions and their thoughts. Abstact expressionism surfaced in the aftermath of WW II, in 1945, and lasted only 50 years.
It was art for greed, the ludicrous art of the "Nouveau riche" and of the "Snobs" (contraction of "Sans" (without) Noblesse"). It was the era of paintings and sculptures sold as investment, often over the telephone ! As for my contribution to this half-century, I would describe myself as an "intimate hyper-figurative" painter and sculptor.
I am in love with nature and its laws; I paint and sculpt "woman" the most beautiful subject ever given to artists, because it is inexhaustible and eternal.
I am neither a sculptor nor a painter of my time, but of all time !"

Barbara Jensen born and raised in Westchester County, NY, Barbara now resides in Daytona Beach, Florida. Self taught, she started doing portrait work in the late 80's and progressed into the erotic in the late 90's. She is a full-time artist selling original Pinups & Fantasy artwork.  A self-representing artist, and ebsq certified.
Most of her works are done in watercolors, colored pencils and other mixed media on board.  She has branched out into the Big Eyed Faerie world and also the world of digital art just because it's FUN!  But her traditional original pinup works remain my forte.
Her work is featured on many pinup and erotic art websites and can also be seen in a few galleries worldwide. Famous for her personalized commission works she works closely with many pinup models and celebrities alike. Publications include her own Art Fantastix Art Premiere book, Club International magazine, Airbrush Action magazine ,Artcore #1, Artcore #5, Sizzle Magazine and The Hot Spot (Erotique Books) among others. And a brand new full color "sketchbook" available.

Baron Von Lind (Born 1937) Jerry Lind was born October 31, 1937 in Duluth, Minnesota, the fourth son of Alma and Hjalmar von Lind. His father Hjalmar was born the son of Baron Johann von Lind in a small town outside of Stockholm, Sweden.
The title of Baron von Lind comes from Baron Johann Von Lind of Stockholm, Sweden, through Jerry's father  being the son of Johann Von Lind. Jerry was born in Duluth Minnesota. His career has always been linked to artwork (excluding his time spent in the army), and has encompassed wildlife, portrait and editorial work. Working for Paramount studios saw him creating numerous portraits of their big name stars of the time, and from this exposure, he was commissioned to produce a portrait of the then President, Ronald Reagan.
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in his artwork, most likely due to the proliferation of pinup information and associated images on the internet. This new found interest keeping Jerry's earlier artwork in the public eye, while allowing him to continue creating new works from his hometown of  Oceanside, California.

Ben-Hur Baz (1906 – 2003) Born in Mexico in 1906, Baz was a pin-up and glamour artist who became known in the late 1940s and 1950s for his association with Esquire magazine. He painted pin-ups for their Gallery of Glamour and contributed to their calendars and centerfolds as well.
Baz was extremely prolific. In addition to his work for Esquire, he provided story illustrations for mainstream magazines, worked on a number of national advertising campaigns, and was a successful paperback novel cover artist.

Bettie Page (1923-2008) Bettie Mae Page is one of the world's most famous pin-up models. She was born in Nashvilee, Tennessee on April 22, 1923. Her parents where Walter Roy Page and Edna Mae Pirtle. Her parents divorced when Page was only 10 years old, leaving her and her sister to an orphanage for a year. Bettie Page was very smart and missed valedictorian of her high school by only a quarter of a point. Her orignial desire was to become a teacher and attended Peabody College however, she soon decided to start studing acting and wanted to become a movie star.
Bettie Page married Billy Neil, someone whom she'd attended high school with. They divorced in 1947 and her modeling career began. It all began when she encountered Jerry Tibbs on an desserted beach in 1950. It was Jerry who suggested that Bettie get bangs to compliment her face by covering some of her forehead. The bangs became a trademark for Bettie Page.
Bettie Page became a famous model by working for a popular camera club that was started in the 1940s. This club was set up to bypass restrictions set on photographic nudity for artistic purposes. Bettie was a natural in front of the camera and displayed no inhibitions about nudity, this made her a instant hit. She worked with a man named Irving Klaw, posing for bondage and sado-masochistic themes for mail-order pin-up requests. It was this move that made her fhe first famous bongage model.

Bettie Page was published as Playboy's "Playmate of the Month" in the Janurary 1955 issue. The magazine was then only two years old. For years, the last known facts of her life were her divorce from Walterson in the early 1960s and that she was working as a secretary for a Christian organization. However, one day in 1958, Bettie attended a temple in the Key West, being drawn to the mixed races, she began to attend reguarly.
Bettie Page's popularity rose again in the 1980's and still today is found to be a cult favorite. The artist Olivia De Berardinis is most famous for her artwork of Bettie Page. Olivia's work of Bettie Page has been published on all kinds of merchandise.
Her mysterious disappearance from the public eye only fueled the public's fascination. In fact, for two decades no one was sure where she was, or if she was still alive. She resurfaced in the 1990s after being tracked down for a documentary. She occasionally granted interviews and sold autographs, but refused to allow her picture to be taken in her old age. In a 1993 telephone interview, she told a reporter that she was "penniless and infamous." She later hired a law firm to help her recoup some of the profits being made with her likeness. She spent her final years living in Los Angeles with her brother. After a three-week battle with pneumonia, she suffered a fatal heart attack on December 11, 2008 at the age of 85.

Bill Medcalf (???? - ????) Though research hasn't yet confirmed it, Bill Medcalf is apparently another Sundblom shop graduate. Though not as prolific (or nearly as well-known) as Gil Elvgren, Medcalf is of all the would-be Elvgrens, including both Ekman and Ballantyne the master's nearest equal, turning out lushly rendered oil paintings of gorgeous All American girls. Medcalf's work turns up on calendars, both in girl-next door tease situations and in the glamorous ball-gown genre. A St. Paul artist who worked for Brown & Bigelow, he seems to have primarily devoted himself to providing pin-up girls to top advertising accounts, including Sylvania ("Miss Sylvania") and Kelly Springfield Tires.

Billy DeVorss  (1908 - 1985) William Albartus DeVorss was born in St. Joseph, Missouri was more commonly known as Billy DeVorss. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1934 and soon after moved to New York to pursue his career in both pin-up art and advertising.
While his work does not have the almost photographic quality of Vargas, it is his use of colour that make Billy DeVorss's work stand out. He worked almost exclusively in pastels, due to both the speed at which he could work and the effect it produced.
At first glance, Billy De Vorss might be dismissed as a shameless imitator of Rolf Armstrong, whose influence extended even to De Vorss' signature. Working frequently with live models, the self-trained De Vorss painted in pastels, like Armstrong, and his beauties (like Armstrong's) often displayed dazzling smiles and sleek limbs.
But De Vorss had his own special charm his works, while uneven, have a warmth and glow, his girls-next-door radiating a good-natured sexuality. Where Armstrong conveyed glamour, De Vorss conveys romance His idealized women seem to benefit from his lack of formal training. Perhaps it's no coincidence that his favorite model was his wife.
Alone among the pin-up artists in being entirely self-taught, Billy De Vorss sold his first three published pin-ups to the Louis F. Dow Calendar Company in St. Paul about 1933. Until that time, he had been working as a teller in a bank in St. Joseph, Missouri. There he had met the stunning woman, Glenna, who became his wife and first official model. Encouraged to develop his talent by Gene Sayles, the manager of Brown and Bigelow's Kansas City branch office, De Vorss soon received his first commission from the company.
To celebrate, De Vorss and his wife moved to New York and set up a penthouse studio in the Beaux Arts Building, at Eighteen East Tenth Street. Signing up with the, prestigious American Artists group, De Vorss spent the next several years working for calendar-publishing houses such as Brown and Bigelow, Joseph C. Hoover, and Louis F. Dow. Most of his pastel originals were large and bore his highly distinctive Art Deco inspired signature.
Covers for Beauty Parade and the King Features Syndicate as well as calendar commissions from the Osborne and Goes companies followed in the early 1940s. In 1949, the artist illustrated a highly successful campaign for Botany Woollen's robes with depictions of handsome men lounging at home with their own De Vorss pin-ups.
De Vorss used an incredible variety of pastel colours for his work, and he applied them directly onto the board, blending them dry with his fingers. His occasional oil paintings bear the rich, painterly brushstrokes of the Sundblom School. Like Rolf Armstrong, De Vorss always worked from live models for the final painting. He did, however, employ photographs for preliminary stages. His vibrant pin-ups, inspired by New York's theatres and nightclubs, display a fine sense of composition, a flowing, graceful line, and a daring blend of colours.
In 1951, Billy and Glenna De Vorss returned to St. Joseph, their first home. After some time there, they settled in Scottsdale, Arizona, where De Vorss died in 1985.

Boris Vallejo (born January 8, 1941 in Lima, Peru) is a painter. He emigrated to the United States in 1964, and currently resides in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Vallejo works almost exclusively in the fantasy and erotica genres. His hyper-representational paintings have graced the covers of dozens of science fiction paperbacks and are featured in a series of best-selling glossy calendars. Vallejo has also created posters for movies such as Barbarian Queen and National Lampoon's Vacation.
Subjects of his paintings are typically gods, monsters, and well-muscled male or female barbarians engaged in battle. Some of his male figures were modeled by Vallejo himself, and many of his later female characters were modeled by his wife. His latest works still retain heavy fantasy elements, but lean more towards the erotic rather than pure fantasy themes.
Vallejo is currently married to fellow artist Julie Bell, whose artistic style is very similar to Vallejo's. He has two children from a previous marriage to artist and writer Doris Vallejo; his son, Dorian Vallejo, also has produced work in the fantasy genre.

Bradshaw Crandell  (1896-1966) was one of the most famous "pretty girl artists" of his day. The astonishingly beautiful blonde is typical of Crandell's ability to merge romance, glamour and sex appeal.
But Crandell rarely contributed a "pure" pin-up. His fame chiefly rests with his twelve years of cover girls (in the 1930s and '40s) for Cosmopolitan, where he succeeded famed cover-girl specialist Harrison Fisher. He provided covers for numerous other prestigious magazines, including Redbook, Judge, Saturday Evening Post and The Ladies' Home Journal. He also produced movie poster art for Twentieth Century Fox.
Occasionally he did a calendar or took an advertising assignment that fell more squarely in the realm of the pin-up, proving that had he wanted to go head to head with Petty, Vargas and the rest, he would have been high on every body's final list.

Carlos Cartagena (1960-  ) born on April 29th in Guatemala City, Guatemala.  In school, the teachers were impressed with Carlos drawing ability but later he wanted to do more than just draw.  In 1981, he followed his American dream and migrated to the Unites States, his first ten years in the U.S. he worked in different types of jobs but it was in the late 80,s when he started self teaching airbrush techniques, making lots of mistakes in the process but moving forward with his big dream.
In 1990, landed his first job as an illustrator for a Southern California luminous sign company.  It was good practice and he perfected many skills there.  But soon it was time to advance...he would divide his time between freelance work, painting requests on leather jackets and a custom Harley Davidson bikes.  Although by this time his work was gaining national recognition for his murals on the backs of leather jackets, now he was reaching a wealthier U.S. audience through his work on the tanks and fenders of Harley Davidson motorcycles. And his work was beginning to reflect "his" style - sexy, sometimes erotic, but always in good taste. In 95 and 96 he won 1st places at Sturgis and Laughlin for his mural created in a custom Harley-Davidson.
In 1997 a designer and life-long surfer Mark Buck and founder of Slap-on Art Decals®. Came up with the idea for decals that could be applied to surfboards, car windows, shower doors, skis, skateboards, snowboards...anything with a smooth surface that would look better with a gorgeous image of a sexy woman applied to it.  Cartagena was commissioned for a series of pinups for the first release of decals.  

Advertising went in every magazine from Abercrombie & Fitch to Penthouse, Playboy, Surfer and endless other publications.  Cartagena was an instant success, fans of his work gobbling up the decals and writing   letters and notes to him from around the globe.  He had finally reached the international audience.  Slap-on was a HUGE SUCCESS and the floodgates opened for anyone looking for the hallmark of pinup artists.  Carlos Cartagena had achieved his dream of international recognition and success and is sought out worldwide for his work.

Carlos Cruz-Díez (born August 17, 1923 in Caracas) is a Venezuelan kinetic and op artist. He is a well-known international artist, currently based in Paris. He has spent his professional career working and teaching between both Paris and Caracas. He has become an icon in the Latin American art world, and his work is represented in museums and public art sites internationally. He is currently represented by two American galleries: Sicardi Gallery in Houston, Texas, and Moka Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.

Donald L. "Rusty" Rust (1932 - ) was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He began drawing and painting at a very early age and has never had the desire to be anything but a serious artist. His early work was directly influenced by his grandfather, Emil Rust, Gil Elvgren, Bob Toombs, and Norman Rockwell. However, he feels there has been no one single influence in his wildlife art and insists that all wildlife artists have affected his style.
For many years, Rusty's paintings concentrated on circus and portrait subjects; but recently, wildlife subjects have intrigued him more and more. His portraits include such prominent individuals as: Emmett Kelly Sr., Emmett Kelly Jr., Merle Evans (Ringling band leader), Norman Rockwell, and Molly Rockwell. In fact, D.L. Rust and Norman Rockwell used to correspond regularly and in one letter Rockwell emphasized that Rusty's artwork "is very good indeed."
Rust's paintings hang in the Ringling Museum of the Circus, Sarasota, Florida; the Norman Rockwell Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He has illustrated books for Valkyrie Press, A.S. Barnes & Co., and World of Yesterday Publications; and has provided illustrations for Reader's Digest and other magazines. His artwork has also appeared on collector's plates, appointment books, wall calendars, porcelain mugs, playing cards and jigsaw puzzles.

Rusty's ability to capture nature lies between fantasy and reality. Realism is his style, but he wants to take the collector's imagination one step further. He is an artist sensitive to nature and its surroundings. The beauty of his artistic documentation is distinctly his own. Rusty takes us not just to a creative visual, but to a place and a story. Rust has produced more than 15,000 paintings and has 2,000 originals registered by owners with the National Museum and Gallery Registration Association (an NMGRA record!). Mr. Rust is also a prolific and talented pin-up and glamour artist. He has painted over 850 pin-up and nude oil paintings preferring large 30" x 24" sized paintings. He was a friend and neighbor to Gil Elvgren in Sarasota, FL and apprenticed with him.

Mr. Rust's preferred medium is oil on canvas and his subjects range from wildlife, scenic's, seascapes, still-life, portraits, glamour, illustrations, pin-ups, camouflage-type, and fantasy to nudes. He has painted many portraits of prominent persons including Emmett Kelly, Sr., Emmett Kelly, Jr., Merle Evans, Lou Jacobs, Charly Baumann, Norman Rockwell, Molly Rockwell, Irish McCalla, and Mamie Van Doren. His work is in Museums such as the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Ringling Museum of the Circus, and the Norman Rockwell Museum. Mr. Rust has done many Limited-edition prints & posters published by such companies as Contemplative Investments, Galaxy Art, Fireside Classics, Voyageur Art, Black Wolf Press, Inc., Canyon Publishing, and Applejack Limited Editions.
Calendars with his work have been published by Shaw-Barton, Daydream Publishing, Brown & Bigelow, Avalanche, and the Golden Turtle Press. He has done many plates for the Bradford Exchange Collector's plates series. He was the first to do limited-edition original paintings (clowns, wildlife, Norman Rockwell portrait).

Drew Posada was born in 1969, as Andrew Posada, with my identical twin brother, Alex Posada. We were raised in a very poor household with our mother and half brother. Alex and I were extremely competitive with each other. We started competing at a very early age and one of the things that was a part of our competitions was drawing. Who could make the best drawing and get the recognition and attention? We didn’t have money to buy sporting equipment and video games, etc. but we always had pencils and paper. If it weren’t for these facts I don’t believe that I would even be an artist.

I graduated high school in West Seattle in 1987 where I received my only art instruction from an art teacher named Phillip Bradshaw. He didn’t teach me technique or art history, he taught me “to see”. I became a professional freelance artist in 1985. After graduating high school I freelanced as an artist and worked as a picture framer. I became a very well known and highly regarded picture framer, but I did not want to spend the rest of my life framing pictures. I did gain a lot of experience working in galleries for 7 years. This is where I first saw Olivia’s work and realized that you could make a very good living doing pin-up work. It became a dream of mine and a goal to someday work for Robert Bane. I first saw Sorayama’s work in 1994 and found out that he too, like Olivia, was at Robert Bane’s gallery. When I first saw Sorayama’s work my jaw hit the floor, the benchmark just got raised way out of my sign, he became my enemy and my mentor, I envied him, he inspired me and discouraged me. In my mind I tried not to “know” that I would never be that good. I read where Sorayama said “…you have to have that hunger..” and I know I have that. I don’t want to be “the next Sorayama” or even try to emulate him, I just want the same success, to do what I love to do, like he does. However, I won’t deny that he is the biggest influence in my work. I’ve been working on my technique ever since I saw his work and I’ll never stop. Sorayama has been a big insecurity in self-doubt that I try to overcome, it’s an ongoing battle. Sorayama will always be the King to me… bastard.

In 1994 I was flown down from Seattle to San Diego to try out for a job as an illustrator at Image Comics. They hired me immediately and I worked for quite a few studios within Image; Top Cow, Wildstorm and Extreme. This is where I learned how to paint in Photoshop. It worked exactly like a real airbrush and was a lot easier to make changes to my pin-ups. I started showing submissions to the Tamara Bane Gallery in 1996, but I still needed to raise the caliber on my work. I kept trying until I finally thought I had it down, and the rest is history. I plan on doing originals by the end of 2000.

Earl Mac Pherson (1910 - 1993) Edgar Earl MacPherson was born on August 3, 1910, in Oklahoma. He moved to Los Angeles after high school, got a job painting movie posters for a downtown theatre, and took evening art classes at the Chouinard School of Art. In 1929, he set up shop at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, painting portraits of wealthy guests.
In 1939, MacPherson was an aspiring glamour artist with a studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. MacPherson married his first model at Brown and Bigelow, then went on to create a unique pin-up calendar that would become a standard in the industry. First published in 1943, his Artist's Sketch Pad became a million-dollar seller. Each page of the twelve-page calendar bound at the top with a spiral binder, featured a primary pin-up figure surrounded by pencil sketches showing the same model in various poses relating to the central image. This was followed by another triumph: his two deck set of playing cards for Brown and Bigelow, called Win, Lose, or Draw, received a total of 168,000 orders in four months. His diary-style calendar, Something to Remember, was his last success before he went off to war in 1944.

Before going to Brown and Bigelow, MacPherson had painted a very famous pin-up image for the Shaw-Barton Calendar Company. The best-selling image in the company's 1941 line, Going Places was so popular that Lucky Strike cigarettes asked to reproduce it on their 1942 calendar with the caption "Lucky Strike Green Goes to War".
Discharged in 1946, after teaching plane decoy recognition to Navy pilots, he settled on a four-acre ranch in Del Mar, California. He also hooked up once again with Shaw-Barton and began the first of nine consecutive years of MacPherson Sketch Book calendars for them. In 1954, Shaw-Barton published a book called Hunting With MacPherson, a parody with pin-up girls dressed as various hunting birds; the same year, the artist. wrote and designed a best-selling how-to book entitled Pin-Up Art for the Waiter Faster Company.

"Winter Scene," circa 1950, is, typically, a pastel, and the cartoon snowman pencil sketch. Mac worked with live models, and men's magazine spreads of him painting lovely nudes, scattered about his modernistic Southern California studio, added to his legend. The versatile Mac Pherson also has a considerable reputation as a Western artist. In addition, he has begun a new series of signed limited edition pin-up prints for Stabur Graphics.
In 1951, MacPherson was stricken with polio, and his assistant, Jerry Thompson, took over the Sketch Book calendar series under the name T. N. Thompson. In the early 1950s, MacPherson had his own television show in Arizona; about 1960, he moved to Tahiti and then traveled widely in the South Pacific. He died in December 1993.

Earl Moran (1893 - 1984) Earl Steffa Moran was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in December 1893. Like many of his contemporaries Moran studied at the Chicago Art Institute, while at the same time working for a large engraving house which specialised in men's fashion illustrations. Moran studied in Chicago for two years before moving on to Manhattan where he enrolled at the Art Students League.
He was a master of pastels, though he showed little if any influence of reigning Brown & Bigelow star Rolf Armstrong, whose domain he encroached upon in the '30s. Prolific Moran, a Chicago Art Institute attendee, was soon a superstar himself, creating lively, sexy girls whose relationship with the viewer was seldom a teasing one. Unlike Elvgren and others, Moran did not continually re-work one type of situation, and his pin-ups have more variety than any other major contributor to the field.

In 1931 he moved back to Chicago and opened a small studio, specialising in photography and illustration. In 1932 he signed an exclusive contract with Brown and Bigelow and produced his first, and perhaps best known, pin-up for the company: "Golden Hours" in 1933. This pin-up proved so popular that it was used to market a variety of products, including a huge 5 pound box of chocolates.
Earl Moran became one of America's best known pin-up artists after Life magazine ran an article on him in 1940. Breaking in via advertising work for Sears-Roebuck, Moran went on to magazine illustration, for example Life, movie posters (Something for the Boys 1944) and even co-published an early "girlie" magazine, Beauty Parade, contributing covers, sometimes under his middle name non de plume, "Steffa".

The early forties where also a time of some hardship for Moran following his bitter divorce from his wife Mura. After the divorce had been settled he moved to Hollywood and commenced painting film stars along with his calendar work for Brown and Bigelow. One of his most famous models whilst in Hollywood was the young Marilyn Monroe, who modeled for Moran between 1946 and 1950. Earl Moran continued to paint for Brown and Bigelow well into the late fifties before deciding to retire to paint fine art subjects.
Although Earl Moran utilised a variety of mediums, e.g. oil on canvas in the 40's and oil on canvasboard in the 50's, he most commonly worked in pastels. His work can often be recognised by his heavy use of light and shadow. His most enduring pin-ups feature his famous late '40s model, Marilyn Monroe. He signed with Aaron Brothers Galleries and continued to paint for collectors until 1982 when his eyesight started to fail. Earl Moran died on the 17th January 1984, in Santa Monica.

Edward D'Ancona (???? - ????)
Evidence suggests Edward D'Ancona worked out of Chicago, and is probably yet another graduate of the influential Haddon Sundblom shop; he is rumored to be the son of an artist father.
His painterly style, the lush brush strokes, the warmth of his colors, the girl-next-door beauty of his subjects, suggest a close linkage to both Elvgren and Sundblom. A prolific contributor of calendar-girl art to numerous companies, D'Ancona's earliest works appear to have been for Louis F. Dow; these are stiff, even awkward pin-ups.
Later, an improved D'Ancona landed advertising accounts, including several soft drink firms who capitalized on his Sundblom-like style, so identified with Coca Cola. By the early 1950s, when he joined the ranks of Art Frahm and Jules Erbit in painting glamour girls in gowns, he could hold his own with the best. Like Otto, his girls were less coy than most, brazenly confronting the viewer with a direct gaze

Edward Runci (1921 - 1986) was born on July 4, 1921 in Genoa, Italy. Edward Runci is an outstanding but unfortunately little-known or talked-about master of pin-ups in oil. His luxuriant brush strokes reveal a talent and skill comparable to Elvgren, though Runci apparently is not a graduate of the Sundblom shop. According to noted pin-up authority Charles Martignette, Runci was a portrait artist in Hollywood when he was approached by a calendar company for pin-ups. Martignette notes that Runci girls frequently get caught in compromising situations climbing a fence to flee a bull, dress blowing up on a Ferris Wheel ride. Runci's early 1950s girls are rosy-checked, voluptuous, often blonde Marilyn Monroe-types whose wholesome sensuality radiates off the canvas. He also dabbled in the glamour-gown sub-genre, creating startlingly life-like effects in the silky folds of garments. Martignette speculates that Runci's artist wife may have likewise done similar, but slightly looser pin-ups also under the singular "Runci" byline. Maxine his wife, also an accomplished artist and sculptor, did some pinups under the name of M. Stevens which were often to be confused with those of her husband Ed's. Later works of Maxine's were signed M. Runci. She also flourished in her career. Both Edward and Maxine died early in life. He died on July 12, 1986. A great loss to the art world.

Elvira (1951-  ) Cassandra Peterson (born September 17, 1951) is an American actress best known for her on-screen horror host persona "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark". She gained fame on Los Angeles television station KHJ wearing a black, gothic, cleavage-enhancing gown as host of Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation. Her wickedly vampish appearance was offset by her comical character, quick-witted personality, and Valley girl-type speech.

Born in Manhattan, Kansas, Peterson grew up in Randolph, Kansas, until the town was drowned to create Tuttle Creek Reservoir. Her family then moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and she graduated from General William J. Palmer High School in 1969. Days after graduating, she drove to Las Vegas, Nevada where she became a showgirl at The Dunes. The Guinness Book of World Records cited her as the youngest showgirl in Las Vegas history. She had a small role as a showgirl in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, briefly dated Elvis Presley, played a topless dancer in Working Girls (1973), and posed (again as a stripper) for the cover of Tom Waits' 1976 album, Small Change.

In 1979, she joined the Los Angeles-based improvisational troupe The Groundlings, where she created a Valley girl-type character upon whom the Elvira persona is largely based. She also posed nude for several men's "Big Bust" magazines during the late 70s and early 80s, most notably, "Night and Day Supermamas" , March 1980, "Cavalcade" volume 3, number 3, 1975, and "Men's Delight", June 1977. Peterson also was a radio show personality on Los Angeles' 106.7 KROQ radio station from 1982 to 1983.

In the late spring of 1981, five years after Larry Vincent (who starred as host Sinister Seymour of a local Los Angeles weekend horror show called Fright Night) died, show producers began the task of bringing the show back. Deciding to use a female host, producers asked 1950s horror host Maila Nurmi to revive The Vampira Show. Nurmi worked on the project for a short time, but eventually quit when the producers would not hire Lola Falana to play Vampira. The station continued with the project and sent out a casting call. Peterson auditioned against 200 other horror hostess hopefuls, and won the role. Producers left it up to her to create the role's image. She and best friend Robert Redding came up with the sexy punk/vampire look after producers rejected her original idea to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Unable to continue with the Vampira character, the name Elvira was chosen. What followed was Elvira's Movie Macabre featuring a quick-witted valley-girl type character named Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. With heavily-applied drag queen-style horror make-up and a towering black beehive wig concealing her flame-red hair, the transformation from Cassandra Peterson to the sexy Elvira was so drastic that no one ever recognized her out of costume.

Shortly before the first taping, producers received a cease and desist letter from Nurmi. Besides the similarities in the format and costumes, Elvira's closing line for each show, wishing her audience "Unpleasant dreams," was notably similar to Vampira's closer: "Bad dreams, darlings..." uttered as she walked off down a misty corridor. The court ruled in favor of Peterson, holding that "'likeness' means actual representation of another person's appearance, and not simply close resemblance." Peterson claimed that Elvira was nothing like Vampira aside from the basic design of the black dress and black hair. Nurmi herself claimed that Vampira's image was based on a Charles Addams' character in The New Yorker magazine.

The Elvira character rapidly gained notoriety with her tight-fitting, low-cut black gown which showed more cleavage than had ever appeared on local Los Angeles television before. The movies featured on Elvira's Movie Macabre were always B grade (or lower). Elvira reclined on a red Victorian couch, introducing and often interrupting the movie to lampoon the actors, the script, and the bad editing. Adopting the flippant tone of a California valley-girl, she brought a satirical, sarcastic edge to her commentary without ever being crass or mean-spirited. Like a macabre Mae West, she reveled in dropping risque double entendres as well as making frequent jokes about her eye-popping display of cleavage. In an AOL Entertainment News interview, Peterson revealed, "I figured out that Elvira is me when I was a teenager. She's a spastic girl. I just say what I feel and people seem to enjoy it." Her campy humor, obvious sex appeal, and good-natured self-mockery endeared her to late-night movie viewers as her popularity soared.

Erik Drudwyn was born in 1968 in Fort Collins, Colorado and raised in Wyoming where he recalls first drawing seriously at the age of thirteen. His mother was an artist so he was exposed to art at a early age. He did a lot of drawing before thirteen then one day he wanted to draw people, especially girls. He wanted to be able to make the beauty that he was beginning to see. The thought of being able to "make beauty" was very exciting.
In 1997 he enrolled at the Colorado Institute of Art. He learned more in the first 6 months at the Institute than he did in his whole life previous to that time. He received his degree from the Institute in the summer of 1989.

Ernest Chiriaka (1920 - ??) Esquire's search for a Varga replacement included such gifted commercial artists of the late 1940s and early 1950s as Ward Bennett, Ren Wicks, Robert Patterson, Eddie Chan and Al Moore. The latter was close to being declared winner, but ultimately Ernest Chiriaka (born 1920) was as close to a new pin-up star as the magazine came. Chiriaka contributed solo pin-up calendars to Esquire from 1953 through 1957.
Chiriaka's women (they weren't really "girls") were sultry and glamorous, often exotically costumed, and sometimes completely un-costumed. These were steamy, sophisticated, not at all wholesome pin-ups. Like De Mers, Chiriaka denoted the post-war modern approach striking design juxtaposed with realistically rendered women. The use of gouache allowed for more gradations of skin tone, trading supple Elvgren smoothness for a palpably sensual earthiness. In the 1940s and '50s, Chiriaka's other area of expertise oddly - enough, considering the modern elegance of his sex goddesses - was western pulp and paperback covers

Fritz Willis (1907 - 1979) was born on December 30, 1907 in Oklahoma City to Hal and Chloe Willis of Irish and English decent.
Willis, the final successor to Earl Mac Pherson in the Brown & Bigelow "Sketchbook" series, is perhaps the last major pin-up artist and the only one truly reflecting the sexual revolution. Primarily known for depicting brazenly sensual '60s women in semi-nude disarray, Willis has only a superficial similarity to Elvgren, the innocent girls next door of the latter having little to do with the wanton women of the former.
Oklahoma-born Willis had a distinguished career in magazine illustration. His clients included Collier's, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post, and his association with Esquire made him one of that magazine's earliest entries in its ultimately vain attempt to create a new Petty or Varga.

Gennadiy Koufay was born in 1961 in the Sevastopol city of Crimea (Russia) on the picturesque coast of the Black Sea. Gennadiy’s imagination and inventiveness was inspired by his father, a brilliant engineer inventor himself, who encouraged four years old boy to make isometric drawings of objects. Gennady’s creative impulses were so diversified and broad that included even unusual for boy work on embroidery in the kindergarten. At the very early age Gennadiy went to Art Studio and simultaneously to Musical school. For five years he has been playing domra, an exotic long-necked, four-stringed instrument, somewhat similar to a banjo or a lute. In 1973 he attended the Sevastopol School of Arts.

The theater played a significant role in Gennadiy artistic career.After successful debut in theatrical production of " Mowgli", Book of Jungle by R. Kipling, twenty years old Gennadiy was appointed a Chief Decorator of the Sevastopol Theater. There followed interesting projects on the stages of many Russian cities, including Kiev and Moscow.
Along with the theatrical production Gennadiy experimented as courtier in the field of high fashion and in 1986 opened his own clothing business. This experience greatly helped him subsequently in New York where he came in December1995. Later Gennadiy moved to Key West, Florida, where he has been working independently as a free-lance artist and completed several noteworthy art projects. Among them highly prized in the press decorative works for the Key West Festivals in 1996, 1997. Now Gennadiy resides in Florida and after noticeable financial independence he start doing what he always want to do, glamour and pinup art.
His efforts achieved much more than combining the expressivity of moment with an emphasis on form and the inherent qualities of the medium: through works he initiated a revival of the true means and meaning of eternal beauty of sexuality.

George Petty (1894 - 1975) George Brown Petty IV was born in Abbeville, Louisiana on April 27, 1894 to George Brown Petty III and his wife, Sarah. The Petty family moved to Chicago, Illinois just before the turn of the century, where George III, a photographer of some note, enjoyed considerable success. George worked in his father's photo shop, where he learned how to use an airbrush. George enrolled in evening classes at Chicago's Art Institute. After his graduation from high school, George traveled to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. He stayed there, studying with Jean-Paul Lauren's and others, until 1916, when World War I caused Joseph P. Herrick, ambassador at that time, to order all Americans to return home. Petty then returned to Chicago, working as a photo retoucher for a local printing company. By the early 20's Petty was working as a freelance artist, painting calendar girls and covers for The Household magazine. It wasn't until 1926 that Petty opened his first studio in Chicago, by which time his client list had grown enormously.
George Petty never discussed in detail those artists that influenced him, other than J. C. Leyendecker (an artist for The Saturday Evening Post during George's high school days) for his interpretation of men, Coles Phillips for his technique, and Maxfield Parrish for his use of light. However, it can be inferred from his later work that other influences included those artists who were extremely popular in Paris at the time, such as Alfons Mucha, George Barbier, and in particular the watercolor technique of England's Russell Flint.

His pin-up art appeared primarily in Esquire and Fawcett Publications's True and was also seen widely in calendars marketed by Esquire, True and Ridge Tool Company. Petty's Esquire gatefolds originated and popularized the magazine device of fold-out centerfolds. Reproductions of his work were widely rendered by military artists as nose art decorating warplanes during the Second World War, including the Memphis Belle, known as "Petty Girls."
George Petty is best remembered for his pin-up creation ‘The Petty Girl’, an American icon that lasted from 1933 to 1956. The Petty Girl was originally based on Petty's wife, although like Vargas and many artist's after him, Petty usually combined the best features from a variety of models. He also often shrunk the head and elongated the torso and legs to heighten the effect. The Petty Girl started life in Esquire magazine in the Autumn of 1933, however she soon spread to advertisements, calendars and film posters. Petty left Esquire in 1940, soon after they had hired Vargas, however he continued to work well into the 70's for companies like ‘True’ Calendars and the ‘Ridgid Tool Company’. George Petty died on July 21st, 1975, in San Pedro, California. More information at .... http://www.thepinupfiles.com/petty.html

Gil Elvgren  (1914-1980) Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Gillette A. Elvgren joined the ranks of Petty and Vargas as one of the premiere American pin-up artists... the Norman Rockwell of cheese-cake. His heroines are often caught in humorous but distressing situations. His exquisite oils of gorgeous girls-next door, their skirts often blowing up to reveal lovely nylon-clad limbs - rival his mentor Haddon Sundblom's "Coca-Cola" Santa's for sheer nostalgic pleasure.
 He attended University High School and after graduation he began studying art at the Minneapolis Art Institute. Some of Gil's fellow students were Coby Whitmore, Al Buell, Andrew Loomis, Ben Stahl and Robert Skemp; many of whom would later work for Coca Cola, as would Elvgren. He graduated from the Academy during the depression at the age of twenty-two. Gil joined the stable of artists at Stevens and Gross, Chicago's most prestigious advertising agency. He became a protege of the monumentally talented Haddon Sundblom, who was most famous for his Coca Cola Santa.
Working in Sundblom's shop (Stevens-Gross) with Al Buell and Andrew Loomis (among other noted illustrators), Elvgren contributed to various Coca-Cola ads himself. Sundblom who had studied at the American Academy of Fine Art taught his star pupil the lush brush stroke technique that makes Elvgren's girls such glowing wonders.

 In 1937, Gil began painting calendar pin-ups for Louis F. Dow, one of America's leading publishing companies. These pin ups are easily recognizable because they are signed with a printed version of Elvgren's name, as opposed to his later cursive signature. Dow paintings were often published first in one format, then painted over with different clothes and situations. These 'new' paintings were then republished and distributed to an unsuspecting public.
 Around 1944, Gil was approached by Brown and Bigelow, a firm that still dominates the field in producing calendars and advertising specialties. They offered him $1000 per pin-up, which was substantially more than Dow was paying him. Elvgren signed on with B&B. Gil's Brown and Bigelow images all contain his cursive signature.
 By the terms of Elvgren's contract with B&B, he would turn out twenty calendar girls each year, ranging from cowgirls of the golden west to sultry sirens of the Riviera. Elvgren looked for models with vitality and personality, and chose young girls who were new to the modeling business. He felt the ideal pin-up was a fifteen-year-old face on a twenty-year-old body, so he combined the two.

An Elvgren model was never portrayed as a femme fatale. She is, rather, the girl next door whose charms are revealed in that fleeting instant when she's been caught unaware in what might be an embarrassing situation. Gusting winds and playful plants grab at her lovely, long legs. She is intruded upon as she takes a bath. Her skirts get caught in elevator doors, hung up on faucets, and entangled with dog leashes. The elements conspire in divesting her of her clothing.
 Today he is best known for his pin-up paintings for Brown & Bigelow. Elvgren was one of the most important pin-up and glamour artists of the twentieth century. In addition, he was a classical American illustrator. He was a master of portraying the feminine, but he wasn't limited to the calendar pin-up industry. He was strongly influenced by the early "pretty girl" illustrators, such as Charles Dana Gibson, Andrew Loomis, and Howard Chandler Christy. Other influences included the Brandywine School founded by Howard Pyle.
Elvgren was a commercial success. His clients ranged from Brown and Bigelow and Coca-Cola to General Electric and Sealy Mattress. In addition, during the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated stories for a host of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping. Although best known for his pin-ups, his work for Coca-Cola and others depicted typical Americans — ordinary people doing everyday things. He died on February 29, 1980.

Greg Hildebrandt (1939 - ) Gregory and Timothy Hildebrandt are among the best known illustrators in the world. Urshurak, a fantasy epic novel, written and illustrated by The Brothers Hildebrandt, is an original, graphically dazzling story which has been called, "a fantasy of the richest sort," by Publisher's Weekly Urshurak is appearing on best-seller lists everywhere. The Hildebrandt's painting for George Lucas' Star Wars was the biggest selling poster in the world. But, most of all, Greg and Tim are known for their marvelous paintings created for J.R.R. Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit". This series of forty-two masterpieces has appeared in three large wall calendars, a desk calendar, and finally in a book entitled The Art of the Brothers Hlldebrandt The calendars have become collector's items and are in demand from Japan to Jamaica. The appeal of these paintings transcends all categories. The fantastic images have the power to delight anyone with a sense of wonder.

The Tolkein paintings: showers of light, storms of darkness, dancing fires, dreaming rivers, find their roots in a myriad of sources. Certainly elements of the old masters, especially Tintoretto, Bruegel, Bosch, and even Vermeer, can be seen. But, it was the story-telling paintings of the turn of the century illustrators, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxtield Parrish, that influenced them the most. Greg and Tim consider themselves story-tellers, first and foremost. It is no accident that their artworks have a filmic quality The discerning viewer will find traces of Walt Disney's Fantasia. Snow White and Pinocchio, coupled with splashes of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is this peculiar synthesization of interests and influences that fuel their creative fires.
The Hildebrandt's virtuoso ability to capture light and form, their classic compositions, and their sensitve isolation of a moment of action or of serenity, makes these paintings of places, things and events that never were, appear to live. Greg and Tim have developed the use of acrylic paint to new levels. Collector's, students and other artists marvel at the meticulous details. The Hildebrandts work from their own photographs of models, often creating the costumes themselves out of rags, papier mache, rolls of paper, and things no longer recognizable. Their studios are crammed with capes, helmets, shields, pointed boots, and clay models of creatures too bizarre to describe.

The odyssey of the Hildebrandt twins began in Detroit about forty-one years ago. Greg and Tim started drawing as soon as they were able to control a pencil. Greg and Tim were always inventing their own stories. When they were sixteen they made a science fiction film in their parent's barn, creating their own sets and special effects. After high school, the Brothers attended an art school in Detroit, leaving after six months when they realized they knew as much as the teachers. They landed twin jobs at the Jim Handy Company where they learned the craft of animation and filmmaking. In 1965, Greg and Tim moved to New Jersey and were commissioned to make several films for the Catholic Church. That experience took them to Europe, Africa and South America. In 1970, the Brothers decided to focus their attention on illustration. Their client list grew quickly from Holt, Reinhart and Winston, to Western Publishing, to Random House, to virtually every major paperback publisher. Their advertising and publishing illustrations were seen by millions, but it wasn't until they created the first Tolkien Calendar that their names became household words.
Today, the Brothers live with their wives and families in New Jersey where they are busy creating materials for a forthcoming motion picture version of Urshurak and are visually developing images for the sequel.

Harry Ekman (???? - ????) Chicago artist Harry Ekman worked side by side with fellow Sundblom shop veteran Gil Elvgren, developing a lush style in oils uncannily like that of his mentor. His girls have the same fresh, wholesome glow as Elvgren's, and are seen in such typical Elvgren-ish situations as bicycling, wading, and walking the dog.
Assisting his colleague in the 1960s, Ekman may even have "ghosted" certain Elvgren signed paintings. His own work appeared under both the Brown & Bigelow imprint and Shaw-Barton. Like Elvgren, Ekman specialized in calendars but also worked in advertising.

Jack Henslee ( ? ) His art has taken him from coast to coast and many a town in-between, but truth be told, he was born and bred a Texan. In fact, except for a ten-year sojourn amid the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, Fort Worth and its Lone Star ladies have always inveigled him home. Of course it wasn't always sultry seductresses and coquettish country girls.
Jack's romance with art began the first time he was able to hold a pencil. His boyhood was spent admiring professional illustrators like Bob Peak, and as a young artist, Jack found himself inspired and impressed by the painstaking truth of realism and traditional disciplines. Largely self-taught, and possessed of a rare gift for detail and drive, Jack's early creative endeavors concentrated upon wildlife studies and Native American subjects. As is often the case with aspiring young artists, however, practical distractions developed. The wildlife and Native American art sparked affection within himself, but no true passion.

It was time for a change. In college, Jack had turned his studies toward architecture, convinced by his peers and loved ones that it was impossible to develop a stable income as an artist. Visions of Frank Lloyd Wright aside, Jack's professional focus gradually shifted toward the more reliable and creatively-challenging trade of graphic design.
After establishing himself and honing his craft for two decades in Texas, Jack was lured by the sultry perfume of desert breezes. His creative talents were placed on loan to the posh resorts and swank casinos of Las Vegas where he spent the next ten years as one of the industry's most prolific and sought-after artisans. He reigned at the top of an exclusive and extremely competitive short list of graphic designers, garnering countless Addy Awards for his clients, and acclaim for his firms.

Personal creativity grew increasingly weary of reading aloud from someone else's script, alas, and Jack became disenchanted by the exhaustive pace and repetitive nature of his adopted trade. It was while toiling amid Hilton billboards and Caesar's Palace tournament banners that Jack's soul demanded that it was time to apply his talents to a path of his own desires; it was time to devote himself to what he affectionately refers to as his "pretty ladies."
And, in those pretty ladies he has, at last, embraced his true passion.

Jennifer Janesko  began drawing and painting female images at a very early age. The Kansas City artist started a freelance career in art after graduating from Stephens College with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Her images began to receive national recognition as her work sold through galleries in NYC, Las Vegas, Chicago, Laguna Beach and Kansas City. The art of Janesko gained international recognition with the launch of her official website in 1996 and the release of her first book in 2002. Playboy magazine featured illustrations by Janesko in the June 1998, March 1999, March 2000 and February 2001 issues. Janesko has been showcased in Maxim magazine, Femme Fatales, PINUP and took the cover of a Scream Queens issue. Janesko work was featured in International publications such as Desire and Skin Two of England, Marquis Fetish Images and OTO of Germany. Additional recognition has been gained through airbrush art publications, such as AIR Brush-Action, Airbrush Art + Action and Airbrush magazines. Television stations such as FOX and MSNBC have also spotlighted the artist's work. Jennifer's original art appeared in the 1994 film "Exit To Eden", directed by Gary Marshall. Recently a portrait of Janesko by artist Dru Blair appeared on the March/April 2008 cover of AIR Brush-Action.

The artist's work is a fusion of her love for pinup, fashion and glamour. High contrast and sharp direction are the two elements that form the basis of her art. The artist uses airbrush and paintbrush to create original mixed media paintings. Studies are created using a wide variety of materials including charcoal, pastel, colored pencil, watercolor, ink and graphite on various surfaces. Original paintings are currently sold through the Janesko website and various exhibitions. The artist also accepts private commissions.

Current Janesko projects include creating new original and print images. Janesko has just completed the third wine label in association with Haut Art Wines of Napa Valley. She is currently branching out in new and exciting directions with a series of images painted on guitars for GZ Guitars, Inc. The artist also has plans to teach pinup classes at the Blair School of Art in North Carolina. Future projects will feature the artist's talents and passions in the world of fashion.

Jessica Dougherty of Seattle, Washington U.S.A. I am a modern pin-up artist who works mostly with digital painting in Photoshop. I paint pin-ups because I love all things beautiful and enjoy the sense of playful sensuality I found in the old pin-up masters' works such as Elvgren. I love nothing better than a good giggle and eyebrow raise when looking at an artwork and I strive to achieve the same result in my works.
I think it is wonderful to be a woman and celebrate my femininity through my artwork. I believe that what makes a woman beautiful lies not only on the outside, but must also radiate from the inside. Therefore, I find my favorite subjects to paint are those women whose distinct personalities I already know or can easily see in their photos. Often it is not your run of the mill super model that elicits a physical or emotional response but rather, the woman you see in your local coffee shop. The mere fact that they are "real" and attainable makes their image more seductive and personal. All of the women that I paint, including myself, are women who truly exist in the world (looking their best of course). They are soft and supple, opinionated and bitchy, inviting and compassionate, strong and smart. Most of all, they are not victims but instead, proud and unashamed of their sexuality. To me, that is the ultimate form of feminism.

I grew up moving from place to place but am originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I now live with my husband, daughter (6), son (1) and kitty in Seattle, WA. I received my B.A. from the University of Washington in 2001 and have painted free-lance for private collectors and gallery shows ever since.  All my work can be viewed at www.jessicaspinups.com or various pin-up collection websites on the web.
I'm inspired by beautiful women (faces especially) and sexy poses and attitudes. I also love moody settings and vibrant colors.Art is a beautiful expression of what we see and think about in every day life...only better. Completely randomly it seems...they just come to me when I'm doing dishes or gardening etc.
Ever since I was a small child and a teacher asked me in 2nd grade after I had won all the art contests for the year if I was going to be an artist when I grew up. I told her no at the time because I didn't think it was actually a real job.

 I frequently get big ideas and themes that I want to pursue and so I do. I don't think about it too much or I would never produce anything. I think it is wonderful to see masterpieces that inspire you to rise to their levels and abilities. I love to look at something that actually comes from another time and place. It makes history seem more real and tangible and it is interesting to see how little changes from the past to now when it comes to basic human needs and desires.
I usually work with individuals on commissions to create works that are very specific to their needs. I love the delight on a client's face when I'm able to make real a concept they had but couldn't yet see. Often they say it is better than they had imagined...no better reward for me than that! I love working with people on commissions but my favorite is when I get to put together groups of art around a common theme that I have full say on and are completely my inspiration.

Joe De Mers (1910-1984) Joseph De Mers was born in San Diego, California, and attended the Chouinard Art School in Los Angeles. Joe De Mers specialized in illustration that depicted the modern American girl. He did them not as stereotypes, but as a diverse array of dazzling females sweet, predatory, or sophisticated. To dress them, he enlisted the fashion expertise of his wife, Janice, so that the styles would not become dated in the six months between painting and publication. Died in 1984 (Hilton Head Island, South Carolina)

John Kacere (1920-1999) Born: June 23, 1920; Walker, IA. John Kacere was an abstract painter from 1950 to 1963, but moved to a realistic style; he has been considered a photo-realist or hyper-realist, although he has not adopted the methodology of these schools. Since 1963, he has concentrated on the subject of woman.
Kacere was born in 1920 in Walker, Iowa. He showed artistic ability as a child and did his first professional sign-painting job at age 12. Attending art school in Chicago from 1938 through 1940, he studied commercial art at first. Exposure to fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums, however, inspired kacere to shift the direction of his own work to the fine arts.

At first, Kacere was especially interested in the work of Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. He also cites Holbein and Ingres as favorite artists. Before he entered the army, Kacere held his first one-man show in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Stationed in California during the war years, he began to study the work of the European moderns: Picasso, Miro, Klee and Matisse. Upon leaving the army, Kacere studied fine arts at the University of Iowa.
He began his teaching career in 1950 at the Umversity of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Since then he has taught at the University of Florida, Arizona State University, the Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, the University of New Mexico, and Cooper Union and the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Kacere does not consider himself a photo-realist, although his highly detailed work is sometimes called photo-or hyper-realistic. Unlike the photo-realist painters, who work from detail to detail of their canvases, Kacere works on all areas of the canvas at the same time and builds up layers of paint.
Despite criticism from feminists, some of whom have labeled his work sexist, Kacere has continued to specialize in paintings of the female body since 1963. "Woman is the source of all life, the source of regeneration," he has said. "My work praises that aspect of womanhood."
Kacere has had many one man shows in New York City. He has also shown in Paris and Hamburg, and his work has been enthusiastically received in Europe. It is held in private collections worldwide.

Jon Hul was Born in Pittsburgh in 1957, an American pin-up artist known for his photorealistic paintings and drawings of models who have appeared in Playboy magazine.
He grew up in California and Nevada. He attended Orr Junior High School in Las Vegas, NV in 1971. In 1974, he attended Valley High School where he studied ceramics, oil painting, watercolors, and commercial design. After graduating from Valley High School in 1976, he taught himself how to play drums and played gigs off and on for a few years in a funk band called Soul Connection. He decided to become a full-time artist in 1987 and to focus on fatherhood.
He is not a college graduate, and is mainly self-taught. He has noted as early influences the artists Salvador Dalí, Frank Frazetta, Alberto Vargas, M. C. Escher, Pablo Picasso, and later Patrick Nagel, Olivia De Berardinis and Hajime Sorayama. Frequent subjects for his erotic art include Shae Marks, Suzi Simpson, Victoria Zdrok, Julie Strain, Anna Nicole Smith, and Pamela Anderson. He uses the media of watercolor, acrylic paint, oils, and pencil.

Joyce Ballantyne (1918 – 2006) is a noteworthy member of the small "girl's club" among pin-up artists. Like Zoe Mozert, she captured a fresh, real sensuality in her subjects, and a palpable sense of fun. Like Mozert, she was (and probably still is) as attractive as a pin-up herself blonde, green-eyed, and frequently barefoot. She is best known as the designer of the Coppertone girl, whose swimming costume is being pulled down by a dog.
She was born in Norfolk, Nebraska just after World War I, and grew up in Omaha. She attended the University of Nebraska for two years and then transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago to study commercial art. After two years at the Art Institute, Ballantyne joined King Studios, where she painted Rand McNally maps and illustrated books for Cameo Press. She then moved to the Stevens-Gould Studio, where she remained for more than a decade. While at the studio, she became part of a group of artists that included Gil Elvgren, Al Moore, and Al Buell.
In 1945 Ballantyne began painting pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow, having been recommended by Gil Elvgren. While there, she designed direct mail pin-up brochures for the company, and was eventually given the honor of creating an Artist's Sketch Pad twelve page calendar. She often used herself as a model.
In 1954, Ballantyne painted twelve pin-ups for a calendar published by Shaw-Barton. Upon the calendar's release in 1955, demand was so great that the company reprinted it many times.
Ballantyne then went on to paint one of the most famous advertising images ever, when Coppertone suntan lotion asked her to create a billboard image in 1959. That image, of a pigtailed girl with her bathing suit being tugged down by a small dog, has become an American icon. Her daughter Cheri was used as the model for the girl.
The vivid oils of advertising artist Ballantyne (Coppertone's little girl whose bathing suit is being tugged off by a playful puppy is hers) rival those of her one-time instructor Gil Elvgren. While this example clearly echoes Elvgren (whom she reportedly assisted and even ghosted), Ballantyne's women were often depicted in a looser, more natural fashion than the studiously coy poses of her male counterparts.
Joyce Ballantyne eventually moved into the realm of portraits and fine art, painting the portraits of scores of entertainment and sports personalities as well as luminaries from the business, social, and academic worlds. Subjects included comedian Jonathan Winters, Robert Smalley of Hertz, and Major General John Leonard Hines. In 1974, Ballantyne moved with her husband to Ocala, Florida where she lived until her death on May 15, 2006.

Jules Erbit (???? - ????) Little is known about Jules Erbit, but this master of pastels was one of the most prolific pin- up artists from the 1930s into the 1950s. His lovely women grace calendars, posters and prints, published by C. Moss, Brown & Bigelow, and others. Bathing-suit beauties are rare among the works of Erbit, who specialized in more sedate, but nonetheless sensual images. Erbit typifies the glamour approach a characteristic Erbit pin-up features a lovely woman in a gown leaning against the rail of a ship, or lounging in a garden. It's a soft-focus, flowers-in-the-hair world.
The artist's Masterful use of pastels for his radiant beauties puts him securely in the camp Rolf Armstrong followers; but, unlike Billy De Vorss, Erbit has his own immediately distinctive style. Where Erbit most resembles Armstrong is in the size of the (few known surviving) originals massive works, they typically measure 14" by 31".

K.O. Munson (1900-1967)  Knute (K. O.) Munson was born in Oslo, Norway, and grew up in Sweden. His family moved to the United States when he was a teenager and settled in Michigan. Munson received his first commission before he ever studied art, when a local doctor hired him to draw medical illustrations for his lectures on surgery. Munson went to Chicago when he Was twenty-three to study at the Academy of Fine Art and the American Academy of Art, where his teachers included Andrew Loomis, He later studied with Harvey Dunn at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City.

Returning to Chicago, Munson got a job illustrating catalogues for men's clothing and accessories and became on the job friends with Earl Moran. Loomis later advised Munson to consider advertising art as a career and referred him to Outdoor Advertising Incorporated, where he painted advertisements for Milky Way candy bars. In 1936, Munson received a call from Moran, who was then a staff artist at Brown and Bigelow. Moran told him the firm had liked the samples he sent and that he should "grab paint brushes and get here right away".
Seven years later, Munson inherited the firm's popular Artist's Sketch Pad calendar when Earl Mac Pherson entered the service. Sticking to the pastel medium, Munson replaced Mac Pherson's Petty smooth pin-ups with sharper, crisper lines, though the soft curves of his bright-eyed beauties were definitely appealing. He revised the calendar, applying a vignette technique inspired by Dean Cornwell's work that produced the overall effect of an intimate studio work. Munson's pastels for the calendar featured healthy, vital women, full of warmth and softness.

 In 1945, Brown and Bigelow used Munson's pin-ups for their Direct Mail Calendar line. He continued to produce dozens of pin-up paintings and drawings for the firm until 1949, when he decided to return to Chicago. There he kept busy as a freelancer. Earl Carroll's Theatre Restaurant in Los Angeles, billed as "The Glamour Spot of Hollywood", commissioned him to do a painting for an over-size souvenir postcard. Soft-spoken sportsman Munson had been (and continued to be) a successful commercial artist; over the years his clients included Lucky Strike cigarettes, Kelly-Springfield Tires, U.S. Rubber Corporation, and Goodrich Tires., Motorola, Mars Candy and Sealy Mattress (an ad for the latter featured a fetching Munson beauty lounging on a cloud).
During his years at Brown and Bigelow, Munson had become an accomplished colour photographer, and in his new studio on Chicago's North Side, he added photographic work to his commercial art jobs, continuing to create pretty girl art for various companies. As painted pin-ups went out of vogue, he had the foresight to shift into shooting cheesecake photo layouts for such men's magazines as Modern Man and Figure.

In 1958, Artist and Photographer magazine ran a cover story entitled "K. 0. Munson and His Glamour Queens". Munson, described as "unpretentious, congenial, frank", reflected as follows on the interplay between painting and photography: "The camera becomes one of the painters most useful and important tools. Painting, on the other hand, with its centuries of tradition and its massive accumulation of knowledge has been invaluable to the photographer.. Each has much to offer the other".
Not much is known about the "when" of many Munson projects, including Munson himself. His teachers included Andrew Loomis, who pointed Munson toward advertising (Goodrich, Lucky Strike, Ice Follies, Milky Way) and Harvey Dunn. But it was friend Earl Moran who gave him the most successful suggestion: glamour pin-ups. Munson's pretty pastel girls graced calendars, blotters, postcards, matchbooks, and promotions. He took over Brown and Bigelow's Artist Sketchbooks while Earl MacPherson was in WW2 service. Adding color photography later in his career, his works was published in slicks like Modern Man.

Larry Vincent Garrison (1923 - 2007)  was born in Detroit on June 12, 1923. He enlisted in the Marine Corps during World War II, and while serving on Midway Island in the Pacific, fellow Marines paid him to make sketches of them that they could send home. After his discharge from the Marines in 1947, he enrolled in the New England School of Art in Boston, where he studied for three years.
  After a short stint driving stock cars, he moved to San Diego in 1951 and went to work for Rohr Corp. in Chula Vista as a production efficiency expert. Four years later, he opened a studio near Fifth Avenue and Date Street downtown to devote all his time to painting.
  Larry Vincent Garrison followed his muse and became a portrait artist, painting couples, families and children. He made his living as an artist, but after several years he felt restricted by the structured nature of portrait work. Encouraged by fellow artist Julian Ritter, Mr. Garrison switched to painting nudes in 1963. He took to the form immediately and spent the next four decades trying to capture the graceful line and subtle tones of the human body. Works by Mr. Garrison, who painted under the name Vincent, are on display at more than 300 galleries around the world.
  His art has been displayed at such galleries as Symic in Beverly Hills and Insomniac South in Redondo Beach. Vincent, an internationally known artist is a favorite of fine art connoisseurs. His paintings are held in thousands of public and private collections around the world. Long considered to be a modern master following in the traditions of Reuben's and Renoir, he gained inspiration studying the Great Masters in Europe, and with the renowned nude artist Julian Ritter. Using an ingenious blend of opaque pigments, and transparent glazing on Masonite, he is able to achieve the striking translucent quality of skin tones and their subtleties. This, along with an amazingly delicate balance of color and form exemplify a unique style which is his trademark. While viewing one of Vincent's works you sense the unmatched rapport and intimacy created between model and artist. The ability to bring out the model's inner beauty with her external femininity provides a challenge to all artists, but one that Vincent has accomplished.
  Mr. Garrison often said he was captivated by the elegance of women and wanted “to put women on a pedestal.” “He enjoyed the female form,” his daughter Barbara Spinali said. “It was lucid and beautiful to him. He thought painting it was a way to honor women.” The challenge of capturing the human form was Mr. Garrison's passion.
  “There is nothing more difficult than painting nudes,” he said in a 1983 interview with The Plate Collector magazine. “Everyone's a critic. If I paint that tree, then it doesn't matter if the branches go this way or that way. But, everyone knows what a body is supposed to look like.” Mr. Garrison painted hundreds of nudes, often completing two a week. He sold most of his work through galleries or a Los Angeles art dealer.
 He died on April 12, 2007.

Leo Jansen (1930-1980) was a Dutch artist known for his portraits. Born April 1930 in Holland, moved to Indonesia when he was ten. There in the tropics, he began his craft by sketching bronze-skinned Indonesian girls for leisure. He returned to the Netherlands to study at the Academy of Art, to refine his growing mastery of the female figures. Like most continental artists, he gravitated first to Paris and quickly established himself as a portraitist of considerable talent. In 1962, he arrived in New York. Because of the softness and light he infused his portraits, he was chosen by several companies to do commemorative plates. Jansen is, perhaps, best known throughout the United States and Europe for his mother's day plates and puppies plate series.

Many of the rich and famous (such as Raquel Welch, Willian Holden, Donald Sutherland, Stephanie Powers, and the LA Times Hearst family. ) sought out Jansen for his portraiture skills, Jansen's sitting fee in the 1960 was US$20,000. In addition, he also gained fame for his portraiture of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. His Beatles portraits are among the more collectible memmorabilia by fans. He was in great demand in the Los Angeles galleries, but sold primarily through Aaron Brothers.

But despite his national reputation as a portrait artist, he refused many of those demand and resumed his childhood love affair of painting nudes. He then moved to Southern California. For eighteen years, he was commissioned by Playboy Magazine to paint the playmate of the month. In his first six years, he was the artist chosen to paint 58 of the 72 portraits. His works hang in the Hugh Hefner's Playboy corporate headquarters and in the mansion. Rank among the nation's best interpretive artist of nudes, Jansen's canvases hang in collection of a wide range of notables from Jean-Claude Pascal to the late Judy Garland.
He died from an apparent heart attack in December 1980 at 50 years of age.

Lorenzo Di Mauro (1954- ) He was born and raised in Sicily, in a town at the foot of Mount Etna where, during his high school and university years, he used to ski intensely on. Skiing is one of his strongest passions. He began his career drawing comics and creating illustrations with brushes and airbrush. In 1981 he published my comic entitled Superpipe and an illustration on an Italian issue of Playboy magazine. During the same year he moved from Sicily to Rome and joined the Illustrators Association, which had just born in Italy. For a couple of years he continued to produce comics and illustrations, including the first works on pin-ups, beginning his collaboration as freelance illustrator with Italian subsidiaries of the most important international advertising agencies. During the 1980s, the advertising market in Italy offered alluring opportunities of financial reward and professional recognition and soon his time was booked up by these publicity work, made mostly of hyperreal illustrations.

During the 1990s, his rapport with advertising remained quite intense, but he was no longer having much fun. He was curious about multimedia and he experienced the creation of a number of interactive CD ROM and animations for internet. In 2001, he went back to one of his first passions: the creation of pin-up paintings. Digital painting, that is, because at that point he had already substituted the brushes with the graphic tablet. He had began to learn how to use the computer during the 1990s, nevertheless continuing to use acrylic colours, brushes, and airbrush as I always had done before. Only after he found the means and the necessary manual skill to create with digital media almost all that he was creating with the natural media, he began using them professionally. Today his work is almost exclusively in digital, though he works with the old tools for a few traditional illustrations and commissioned works.

Lorenzo Sperlonga (1969-  ) was born in Rome, Italy. At the age of 16, he began his career as an illustrator and a graphic designer for advertising agencies and small publishers. In those first few years, he soon realized that painting was his true calling, and little by little he focused his artistic interests entirely towards sci-fi, fantasy and erotica.
The year 1995 marked the beginning of his career as a pin-up artist: he painted his first cover for SKORPIO - the biggest comics magazine in Italy: since then, many of his magazine covers still appear every year on Italian newsstands. The public learned very quickly to recognize his style, especially after his paintings were featured in Playboy and Penthouse, in their respective Italian editions.

As his covers started to appear in Australia, South America and Eastern Europe, the American market initially opened its doors to Lorenzo in 1998. That was the year that prompted Lorenzo to move to Los Angeles, where he began his collaboration with Larry Flynt Publications, as well as many other publishers such as Avalanche, Aeg, Sizzle, Fort Ross.
However, in Lorenzo's words, the "real big one" happened in 2000 when he became a cover artist for historical fantasy comics magazine Heavy Metal. Since then, dozens among covers, posters and calendars followed that very special piece. Tamara Bane Gallery and Lorenzo started to work together in May 2002,  just a couple of months preceding the world-wide release of his first book by MG Publishing: “The Art of Lorenzo Sperlonga”.  
On the wings of that international success, MG soon contacted him again to commission the double cover of the premiere issue of Artcore, the first periodical entirely dedicated to pin-up art. In the past three years, Lorenzo Sperlonga took part to exhibitions at Tamara Bane Gallery in Los Angeles and Echo Gallery in Chicago. In 2004, RCI International started a new line of hand-painted sculptures inspired by his masterpieces. In 2006 Heavy Metal and Infinity present his new book "Dirty Works": 104 pages of his latest artwork.

Mel Ramos (born July 24, 1935 in Sacramento, CA) American Pop Artist is famous for hi paintings of nude women from pin-up calendars and magazines. His work is humorous as he often poses the women with large, out-of place objects and gives the paintings amusing titles. He also often poses his figures to mimic the paintings of the Old Masters. His work can also be described as Superrealism.

Michael Calandra (1972-  ) was born in Monroe, Michigan and began painting and drawing at a very early age. No surprise there, all kids draw, but he never stopped!
Throughout his teens, he taught hisself line quality and drawing by copying and imitating comic artists. Most of you know very well the art of Frank Frazetta, Bernie Wrightson, Jose Gonzalez (Vampirella), and the entire stable of artists at Warren. He couldn't wait to scrape up the couple of bucks every month to go grab the latest Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella.
By the time he entered Monroe County Community College on an art scholarshipin 1980, he had started to focus on portraits, wildlife, and general art technique. He was also taught the best lesson of all-I HAD TO WORK! Thanks to Gary Wilson and Ted Vassar, he slowly began to round out and discover his own technique, which he still does today.
Ted Vassar was a wildlife artist at the time, and being influenced by him. He began painting wildlife and doing many shows and competitions. He had works appearing in many publications including Monroe Magazine, Michigan Out-of-Doors,Wyoming Wildlife, and Wildlife art News.In 1987, he recieved a commendation from the State of Michigan for artistic achievement. He competed in the Michigan Wildlife Artist of the Year Competition and placed in the top five in 1988 and 1989.
Despite all the busy activity in the wildlife field, he still had an attatchment to the horror genre. He continued to draw Frankenstein, Dracula, and assorted zombies. This type of work is at the opposite end of the spectrum from wildlife, but most artists do a variety of subjects. He liked the painting well enough to have it licensed through Sony Merchandising and had it printed as a Limited-Edition. Because of his ventures into the horror art realm, he have had the opportunity to meet many of the horror film heroes that had inspired him in his youth. Some of these people, such as Tom Savini, Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Ted Nugent, and the band Kiss now own some of his work!
Learning the mechanics of the airbrush has taken him into the world of nudes and pin ups. The airbrush lends itself to this genre, and he has no shortage of work or inspiration in this arena. While he is currently working almost exclusively in the horror art, pin up, and fantasy field, he does a lot of architectural commission work . These projects make up the body of his current work. He really have a great time meeting and working with other artists, models, and photographers.
 He resides in Sylvania, Ohio, where he owns and operates a frame shop and art studio.

Michael Möbius was born in 1968, and spent his formative years in his native East Germany. When the walls to that Communist "no fun" zone came down, this creative illustrator's love of the female form was set free as well! Inspired by such fellow iconic innovators as Sorayama and Renato Casaro, Michael launched a new career as an illustrator of erotic visions. An artist of high voltage and luxurious delights, Möbius' work has already been featured in many gallery showcases throughout the world.

Michal Dutkiewicz (1955-  ) was born in Adelaide, Australia, as the son of a painter. He studied science, which he quit to spend a year with the South Australian Youth Theatre in 1974. Between 1976 and 1990 he had several exhibitions of his artwork, most of them with the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. At the same time, Dutkiewicz worked as an illustrator and comic artist, especially for American publisher D.C. Comics, where he drew for several series, including 'Superman' and 'Batman'. He also published his work in Australian magazines like Reverie Comic Magazine and Eureka, for which he did 'Verity Aloeha'. In 1991, he won the Stanley Award for the Best Adventure Strip Artist.

 Olivia de Berardinis (1948 - ) was born in California. She is an American painter of pin-up art and erotic art, professionally known as Olivia. After high school she attended the New York School of Visual Arts and became involved in the minimalist art movement, painting minimalist oils on canvas.
Olivia began to draw and paint pictures of beautiful women in the mid-1970's and, in a short time, was very successful with painting erotic fantasies for popular men's magazines. In 1977 she and her future husband formed the O Card Company, Inc. to publish her work in the form of greeting cards. She signed her first fine art publishing agreement in 1984 and had her first one-woman gallery show in Los Angeles three years later. Olivia has had shows throughout the United States and Japan and her work is collected by fans worldwide. (more information at.... http://www.rbeditions.com/oli_bio.asp )
She resides with her husband, Joel Beren, in Malibu, California.

Patrick Nagel (November 25, 1945 - February 4, 1984) was an American artist. He created popular illustrations on board, paper, and canvas, most of which emphasize the simple grace of and beauty of the female form, in a distinctive style descended from Art Deco. He is best known for his illustrations for Playboy magazine, and the pop group Duran Duran, for whom he designed the cover of the best selling album Rio.
Nagel was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1945, but was raised and spent most of his life in the Los Angeles area. After serving as a Ranger in Vietnam, Nagel attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1969, and in that same year he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from California State University, Fullerton. In 1971, Nagel worked as a graphic designer for ABC Television, producing graphics for promotions and news broadcasts. The following year, he began work as a freelance artist for major corporations and magazines, including Architectural Digest, Harper's Magazine, IBM, ITT Corporation, MGM, Oui, Rolling Stone, United Artists, and Universal Studios.
In 1976, Nagel began to regularly contribute images to Playboy magazine, which improved his exposure and the popularity of "the Nagel Woman" image to a huge audience. In 1978, he made his first poster image for Mirage Editions, with whom he would print many Nagel women images.
Album cover from Rio.Nagel's 1982 painting for the album cover of rock group Duran Duran's hit album Rio would become one of his best known images. He also worked for many commercial clients, including Intel, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and Budweiser. As his popularity grew he began offering limited edition prints of his work.
In 1984, at the age of 38, the artist participated in a 15-minute celebrity "Aerobathon" to raise funds for the American Heart Association. Afterwards, he was found dead in his car, and doctors determined by autopsy that he had suffered a heart attack. At the time of his death, over 80,000 people owned one of Nagel's limited-edition prints or best-selling lithographs.

Paul Corfield (1970-  ) was born in Bournemouth, Dorset in the U.K. on March 25th. He was able to draw at the age of about six or seven when he would copy pictures drawn by his Grandfather. His next teacher was a Mrs. Short at his secondary school who was probably instrumental in guiding his career to where it is now.
Since leaving school he has been totally self taught in the further techniques of using his paint brushes and airbrush. His work has appeared on the front cover of a series of erotic short stories in Canada. He has been interviewed for an article on pinup art for the Arizona Daily Star. On March 29th 2002 he left his job to paint pin-ups full time. Some of his originals have been bought by Louise K. Meisel and Charles G. Martignette. They co-wrote the book The Great American Pin-up. They are planning a new book to feature contemporary pin-up artists and have said that his work may be included.
Paul Corfield is a member of The Guild Of Erotic Artists. His work has appeared and still does appear in Leg Show magazine and Tease magazine. His work is due to be featured in a forth coming magazine called Black Velvet. He produced a promotional painting for Vodka 02, a new drink in the UK. He has exhibited his work at Erotica UK in London and has appeared on the front cover of a series of erotic short stories in Canada

Pearl Frush (???? - ????) Frush was born in Iowa and moved to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi as a child. She began drawing as soon as she could hold a crayon in her hand; when she was ready for formal studies, she enrolled in art instruction courses in New Orleans. After additional training in Philadelphia and New York, Frush joined her family in Chicago, where she studied at the Chicago Art Institute under Charles Schroeder.
Frush opened her first studio in Chicago in the early 1940s. While she accepted freelance jobs, she also worked at the studio of Sundblom, Johnston, and White. By 1943, she had become one of the Gerlach-Barklow Calendar Company's most important artists, creating a string of popular series: Liberty Belles, Sweethearts of Sports, Girls of Glamour and Glamour Round the Clock. In 1947, her Aquatour series, a dozen pin-ups all located in aquatic settings, broke all sales records. By 1955, Frush had become a "hot property" in the calendar-publishing business, so it was only natural that Brown and Bigelow should seek her out. A year later, the firm published its first Frush pin-up, a horizontal picture especially done for "hangers" (large wall calendars with one print attached).
A vigorous and attractive woman, Frush enjoyed sailing, canoeing, swimming, and playing tennis, and she would often incorporate sport themes into her work portrayed in a crisp, straightforward style, her pin-ups and glamour paintings effectively captured the spirit of young womanhood. Her girls were wholesome and fresh, shapely but never overtly sexual. Somehow they were able to look both like movie stars and like the girls-next-door.
 As one of the top three women pin-up and glamour artists in the calendar art market at mid-century, Pearl Frush readily commanded the respect of the art directors, publishers, sales managers, and printers with whom she worked. Yet because she worked primarily in watercolour and gouache, her originals could rarely be reproduced in large enough quantities for her to achieve widespread popular acclaim.

Fairly prolific in the 1940s and '50s, Chicago artist Frush produced fresh, beautiful, shapely pin-up girls who share with the women of Mozert and Ballantyne an individuality and reality the men in the field seldom achieved. Her originals are comparatively tiny (typically 19" by 14"), and reveal a delicate, flawless technique as beautiful as her subjects. She may be Vargas' only true rival in watercolor, and Petty's in airbrush.
She was not averse to Elvgren-style tease a Frush girl could purse her lips and look coyly at the viewer with the best of them but Frush more often presented her young women in a straightforward manner. By the mid-1950s she was capable of near photographic perfection. A close examination of her work, however, reveals a talent for meticulously realistic images comparable to those of the far better known Alberto Vargas.
Frush's original paintings were executed on illustration board that usually measured about 20 x 15 inches (50.8 x 38.1 cm).  She sometimes signed her paintings with her married name "Mann". Her renderings were always done with great precision, capturing every nuance of a subject in an almost photo-realist technique.

Peter Driben (1925-1975) was born in Boston and studied at Vaesper George Art School before moving to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. His career was not limited to magazine covers, he also worked in advertising and for Hollywood. Peter Driben was perhaps one of the most productive pin-up artists of the 1940's and 50's. Although both Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren have extensive catalogues of work, neither came close to the output of Driben. Driben was born in Boston and studied at Vaesper George Art School before moving to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925. His first known pin-p was the cover to Tattle Tales in October 1934, and by 1935 he was producing covers for Snappy, Pep, New York Nights, French Night Life and Caprice. His career went from strength to strength in the late thirties with covers for Silk Stocking Stories, Gay Book, Movie Merry-Go-Round and Real Screen Fun.

His career was not limited to magazine covers, he also worked in advertising and for Hollywood, perhaps his most famous work being the original posters and publicity artwork for The Maltese Falcon. Peter Driben was also a close friend of publisher Robert Harrison, and in 1941 was contracted to produce covers for Harrison's new magazine Beauty Parade. Driben went on to paint covers for all of Harrison's magazines, often having as many as six or seven of his covers being published every month. Driben married the artist, actress and poet Louise Kirby just before he began to work for Harrison. In 1944 he was offered the the unusual opportunity, for a pin-up artist, of becoming the art director of the New York Sun, a post he retained until 1946. During the war, his popular painting of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima sparked a considerable amount of media attention.

Ricky Carralero (1969-  ) Enrique E. Carralero was born in Puerto Padre Cuba. Little Ricky realized his passion for drawing very early on, "he must have been 5 or 6 years old and his neighbor was this incredible illustrator, he spent hours watching him paint, he knew then this is what he wants   to do". In 1881 Ricky’s parents immigrated to Costa Rica in search of freedom and a better life for their family. He spent two years there until they were able to come to the United States in 1983. He recalls that not knowing the language was horrible! "When he started school he felt like he was in this roller coaster that never stopped. It was very difficult, he was out of place. he had no friends he knew there were kids who knew Spanish but it was not cool to hang out with him. All he ever did was draw in all his classes. "  

Ricky participated in many competitions and won many of them. One day in class this man came to him, he was an art teacher in the School of Visual Arts In Manhattan. He was interested in taking him to a special program and needed permission from the principal to take him out of school. "It was the first time he was in the principal’s office and he wasn’t in trouble." In 1986 Ricky’s family moved to Miami, Florida.

Ricky started working on a series of comic books and characters. He would carry them in his portfolio and go from comic book show to comic book show looking for work. One day he met a man who saw him at every show. They began to speak and made him an offer, which he could not refuse. This man became his publisher soon after. He started working on China and Jazz aka ‘Double Impact’. In 1994 and with both his parents getting second mortgages to build capital of over $50,000 dollars ‘Double Impact’ went to print. "We had all our cards on the table, it was either win or lose. No one knew who ‘Double Impact’ was or Ricky Carralero."

Today Ricky Carralero has not only achieved worldwide recognition but is rated top ten and his work is in huge demand. From comics to fine art Illustration, from comic book covers to CD’s, posters, magazines, Ricky’s electrifying art is appreciated by thousands around the world.

Robert McGinnis (1926- ) is an American artist and illustrator. McGinnis is known for his illustrations of over 1200 paperback book covers, and over 40 movie posters, including Breakfast at Tiffanys (his first film poster assignment), Barbarella, and several James Bond and Matt Helm films.
McGinnis became an apprentice at Walt Disney studios, then studied fine art at Ohio State University. After wartime service in the Merchant Marine he entered advertising and a chance meeting with Mitchell Hooks in 1958 led him to be introduced to Dell Publishing began a career drawing a variety of paperback covers including Edward S. Aarons, Erle Stanley Gardner, Richard S. Prather, and the Michael Shayne and Carter Brown series.

McGinnis later did artwork for Ladies' Home Journal, Women's Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, TIME, Argosy, Guideposts, and The Saturday Evening Post. He was main title designer for The Hallelujah Trail (1965). McGinnis's attention to detail was such that when he was assigned to do the artwork for Arabesque he requested Sophia Loren's tiger stripe dress be sent for him for a model to wear so he could get the right appearance.
In 1985 McGinnis was awarded the title of "Romantic Artist of the Year" by Romantic Times magazine for his many romance novel paperback covers. Since 2004, McGinnis has created cover illustrations for the Hard Case Crime paperback series. He is a member of the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.[6] McGinnis is the subject of a documentary film, Robert McGinnis: Painting the Last Rose of Summer, by Paul Jilbert.

Rolf Armstrong (1899 – 1960) The father of the American pin-up was born in Seattle and moved to Chicago in 1908, where he later studied at the Art Institute. Armstrong, who studied at the famed Chicago Art Institute, contributed covers to such periodicals as College Humor, Life and Shrine magazine; his advertising accounts included Oneida Silverware. A one-time pro boxer and devoted seaman, ruggedly handsome Armstrong was rarely seen without his yachting cap.
 He then went on to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri. After a trip to Paris in 1919 to study at the Académie Julian, he returned to New York and established a studio. In 1921 he went to Minneapolis to study calendar production at Brown & Bigelow.
Armstrong's work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a circulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best selling calendar artist at Brown and Bigelow. In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line.
He came to fame in the 1920s and 1930s. His use of the pastel medium spawned such famous followers as Billy De Vorss, Earl Moran and Zoe Mozert. Though his work appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as well as on the covers of many magazines, it was Armstrong's dazzlingly smiling, flowingly manned calendar girls for Brown & Bigelow that set the glamour-art standard. Many stars posed for his portraits, including Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, and even Boris Karloff.
With a pastel palette of 3600 colors, Armstrong worked with models in his Manhattan studio, creating enormous originals (typical size 39" by 28"), surviving examples of which are today among the most valuable pin-ups. Rolf Armstrong died February 22, 1960, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Sonia Roji  (1971-  ) was born in Madrid (Spain) on June 15th.  Very influenced from her childhood by her artistic family history and interest in art, she immediately began exercising her creativity in any medium, for example, painting and sculpture.  One day her father gave her two books on contemporary fantasy illustrations.  From this moment, she knew what she really wanted to do.  After finishing secondary school she began her training as a professional in Peña Art School (Madríd) where she won various awards from her Fine Art works.  After the classes she continued with autodidactic formation, studying the masters and all the illustration books she had in her hands.
Even though the initial idea was to study at the School of Fine Arts she finally decided she would like to study more specific techniques in the illustration field.  At this moment she enrolled in the C-10 Creative Workshop where she got into illustration and airbrushing guided by one of the best Spanish illustrators, Carlos Díez.  Soon they begin to work together on several projects like books and games amongst other things.

In 1998 she went to GENCON and got in touch with some of the most famous fantasy artists.  A short time later, she moved from Madrid to the beautiful seaside town of Sitges, which is close to Barcelona.  Since then she has worked on interior and cover illustrations for SF, Fantasy and Horror magazines, books, video game covers, concept designs for film and commissions for American and European companies in the art field.  In Barcelona she got in touch with the most prominent Spanish erotic magazines, which began to publish her work immediately.  
Beautiful women always appear in her fantasy works as she finds that in this way she can mix the study of women's bodies and play on the fantasies and desires of the public.  Her work captures this attraction and provocation using a variety of skills and techniques.

HAJIME SORAYAMA (1947-  ) was born in Ehime Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from the Chuo Art School in 1969, he began to work for an advertising agency in Tokyo. Since 1972, he has been working independently as a free-lance illustrator. His published books include:  Hajime Sorajama, Sorayama Hyper Illustrations, Sorayama Hyper Illustrations Part 2, The Gynoids, Naga, Torquere, and  The Complete Works 1964-99. Sorayama resides with his wife and two daughters in Tokyo, Japan.

T. N. Thompson (???? - ????) In the early 1950s, Earl Mac Pherson was turning out not only a yearly 12-image calendar for Shaw-Barton, but numerous other pin-ups on playing cards, greeting cards, posters, matchbook covers, books, the entire panoply of pin-up merchandising. He took on Jerry Thompson as an assistant, and they worked together in California.
The hardy Mac Pherson somehow came down with polio and, for a time, Thompson approached the level of "ghost." When Mac fully recovered and got back into the pin-up swing, he sold Thompson's contract to another publisher, and from 1952 until at least 1958, T.N. Thompson's "Studio Sketches" was a top-selling rival calendar.
Thompson not only worked in Mac's sketchbook style (although eschewing pastels for oil), he used photo reference of Mintahoia D'Roney and other Mac Pherson models. His earlier calendars are quite good; later an overt cartoonist crept in as he moved away from Mac Pherson's influence.
More information at .... http://www.thepinupfiles.com/thompson.html

Vaughn Bass  (???? - 1957) Vaughan Alden Bass appears to have been strongly influenced by the circle of artists that grew up around Haddon Sundblom. He was a Chicago artist who began his pin-up career working for the Louis F. Dow Company in St. Paul during the mid-to-late 1930s.
Bass created his own pin-ups for for Brown and Bigelow, but he was then employed by the Louis F. Dow Company as a "paint-over' artist, commissioned to redo the work that Gil Elvgren had previously created for the company. Dow was motivated by economic interests, hoping to earn more money from such "re designed" Elvgrens. Fortunately, Bass was a skilled and sensitive artist: he strove to leave the faces, hands, skin, and other key areas of the Elvgrens essentially untouched. However, he occasionally had to repaint an arm or hand because it had to be repositioned to accommodate a new over painted image.

Bass' painting style was often compared to that of Elvgren, Buell, and Ballantyne. He worked in oil on canvas in almost the same sizes as the others. In the 1950s, the versatile Bass did a series of spectacular oils depicting wrestling scenes that clearly demonstrated his ability to be comfortable with any subject matter. He created the "Wonder Bread Girl" in the 1950s using his daughter Nancy as his model. His portrait of President Dwight D. Eisenhower is in the Eisenhower Library, in Abilene, KS.

Walt Otto (???? - ????) was another of the Elvgren-style pin-up artists, creating beaming American beauties in lushly painted oils on canvas (for Gerlich-Barclaw, among others). Research has neither confirmed nor denied Otto as part of the Sundblom shop. Despite hyper-realism typical of the Elvgren school, Otto varies considerably from the Elvgren pattern in several key ways. His paintings contain cartoonist elements, particularly in the expressions of his winsome girls (as well as his cartoonist-style signature). Additionally, his women are less coy than Elvgren's an Otto girl typically attired in short shorts or bathing suit, occasionally tugged along by a cute mutt or two stares unabashedly at the viewer. Also, Otto eschews any suggestion of setting for a solid black background, and frequently uses Petty-style cartoon outline shorthand for a phone cord or dog leash or whatever to better focus the attention on the pretty subject at hand.

Zoë Mozert (1907 - 1993) The most famous female pin-up artist, Mozert is an exemplary disciple of the Rolf Armstrong pastel style. Often her own model, Mozert is noted for rejecting sexy-girl clichés in favour of depicting more real-seeming young women, with recognizably individual features and personalities.

Her cover portraits of Hollywood starlets for such publications as Romantic Movie Stories and Screen Book were particularly popular, but she also contributed covers to such periodicals as American Weekly and True Confessions.

While the bulk of her work including such deliriously romantic nudes as "Moonglow" and "Sweet Dreams" was calendar-oriented (primarily for Brown & Bigelow), Mozert also made a mark as a movie poster artist, notably for Carole Lombard's True Confession, and the notorious Jane Russell/Howard Hughes sex and sagebrush saga, The Outlaw. Even her less sultry sirens exude both charm and sex appeal.

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